The Black Prince

By Iris Murdoch

1973

First Published

3.95

Average Rating

432

Number of Pages

13H11M

Audio Length

Bradley Pearson, an unsuccessful novelist in his late fifties, has finally left his dull office job as an Inspector of Taxes. Bradley hopes to retire to the country, but predatory friends and relations dash his hopes of a peaceful retirement. He is tormented by his melancholic sister, who has decided to come live with him; his ex-wife, who has infuriating hopes of redeeming the past; her delinquent brother, who wants money and emotional confrontations; and Bradley's friend and rival, Arnold Baffin, a younger, deplorably more successful author of commercial fiction. The ever-mounting action includes marital cross-purposes, seduction, suicide, abduction, romantic idylls, murder, and due process of law. Bradley tries to escape from it all but fails, leading to a violent climax, and a coda that casts shifting perspectives on all that has preceded.

Avg Rating

3.95

Number of Ratings

6,451

5 STARS

32%

4 STARS

40%

3 STARS

20%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Iris Murdoch

Author · 39 books

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease. "She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world—the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bayley in Elegy for Iris, 1998) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris\_Mur...